Artificial Gardening

Tired of being just another restless nomad, wandering the deserts of the World Wide Web? Perhaps it's time to move on to the next stage of human civilization – settled agriculture. Rest your weary bones at the Tele-Garden, an interactive Web installation from a team of artists, robotics experts, and computer scientists operating out of the University of Southern California School of Engineering.

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In the Tele-Garden, a state-of-the-art robotic arm – manufactured by Adept Technology – hovers above a real-life circular garden planted at USC. Observers peering in via Web video stills can manipulate the arm by pointing and clicking on a schematic of the garden. If you're a registered member, you can water the greenery and plant seeds. You can also link your Web page to a plant.

Tele-Garden is part of USC's ongoing exploration of the stages of humankind using the metaphor of cyberspace. "This project explores a post-nomadic motif where planting and agriculture require spatial and temporal continuity," reads a blurb on the page.

One of the Tele-Garden team leaders is Ken Goldberg, an assistant professor of computer science at USC. Previously, Goldberg and his colleagues struck gold on the Web with an interactive installation that allowed visitors to dig through a sand-filled "archaeological" site and excavate buried treasures.

That was the Paleolithic period – a nomadic time, which, according to Goldberg, is precisely where the Web is now.

The Tele-Garden is meant to represent the next era in human civilization, the Neolithic, when hunters and gatherers settled down and started to grow things, thus giving birth to civilization.

Even with the Tele-Garden's 500-plus registered users, overplanting shouldn't be a problem. The team will relocate existing flora, explained Goldberg, and then encourage members to plant vegetables. Once the plants are mature, it's time for them to go. "Or," Goldberg says, "we may just eat the stuff."

The Tele-Garden: An InterActive Installation on the Web. Co-directors: Ken Goldberg and Joseph Santarromana. Project Team: George Bekey, Steven Gentner, Rosemary Morris, Carl Sutter, Jeff Wiegley. University of Southern California: on the Web at http://www.usc.edu/dept/garden/.